3 ms·

Meanwhile in Canada I have had multiple trips to my doctor, multiple tests, x-rays, ct-scan, blood work, and probably a couple others I am forgetting and my bil

by 14 5y ago

Meanwhile in Canada I have had multiple trips to my doctor, multiple tests, x-rays, ct-scan, blood work, and probably a couple others I am forgetting and my bill has been zero dollars. There is no such thing as a bill. I guess I pay taxes but that is it. As a non American it is so hard to see this and understand how it is allowed to happen. You guys must have to choose between doctors or financial uncertainty and I can't understand how a country as good as USA has allowed this to happen for so long.

eagsalazar2 5y ago
- 14 5y ago
  I called my doctors office, had an appointment 2 weeks later. He ordered tests, about 1 month later got them. The blood work was as soon as I went to the lab and stood in line for half an hour so a few days later. About 5 days after I took the blood tests my doctor called me personally to tell me all negative. In the end I had a pinched nerve from a bit of scoliosis and chiro really helped. Chiro is not covered by our health care completely, I paid $80 then $40 for follow up visits. Chiro took my pain away with an exercise routine. All is well and the system worked fast and I was happy with how it all went.
- nradov 5y ago
  I'm not sure what you heard on Fox News but the average time for a Canadian to go from initial consultation to actual treatment by a specialist was 3 months in 2020. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wait-times-for-health-care-in-canada-2020 https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa... It's common for Canadians who can afford it to travel to the US (and other countries) for more rapid treatment. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-03/canadians-increasingly-come-to-us-for-health-care https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-... Since demand for healthcare is effectively unlimited, all healthcare systems have to ration care. The US system primarily rations based on ability to pay. The Canadian system rations by restricting supply and forcing less urgent cases to wait.
rubyist5eva 5y ago
> There is no such thing as a bill. There are plenty of private healthcare services in Canada. Ever been to the dentist?
refurb 5y ago
As a Canadian my mom waited 16 months for a hip transplant. She could barely get around her house, but she was deemed “lower priority”. While my coworker in the Bay Area got her a choice of surgery slots less than a month out. There are trade offs.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- lifeformed 5y ago
  In the US, the waits are short because few can afford to be in them.
  - nradov 5y ago
    In the US there are about 400K hip replacements performed every year. That's a lot more than a "few". The vast majority of Americans have some form of insurance which covers joint replacement surgery if they meet the medical necessity criteria.
- thawkins 5y ago
  In both Canada and the UK there is also private systems available that you can decide to avail yourself off, which like the US system will charge you into bankruptcy but will give you the immediacy you desire, then you get to have a choice, wait or debt.
  - mardifoufs 5y ago
    At least here in quebec, the private system is not allowed to provide a lot of services and cannot provide much more than basic consultation, cosmetic surgery or treatments that are more or less arbitrarily allowed by the public insurance system. Tons of people went to the state when the public system basically stopped treating anything they didn't deem to be essential for almost a year back in 2020. I know tons of US hospitals did the same, but some didn't so you at least had a choice. Here, once the government decided that your disease, surgery or therapy wasn't "essential" you couldn't do anything at all because the private system can't do most them either. Both of my parents are nurses & according to them at one point their hospitals were almost entirely empty, but because of that arbitrary you still couldn't access most non-urgent care which was very frustrating for them.
rtkwe 5y ago
There's a lot of reasons behind it I think as a complete history/politics deletant; damage from cold war anticommunism, side effect of post world war 2 success, and the general story the US and it's citizens tell about themselves as individualistic. The US came out of WW2 immensely wealthy (overall of course not everyone was allowed to participate in the boom) which buried a lot of the impetus that pushed other European countries to create their national health systems. Then we were fighting against communism which took so many forms of social programs into the area of forbidden ideology that could spell the doom of the US and the rest of the world. And then there's just the individualistic streak that seems to have been endemic to the US since it's founding. Religiously as well as economically there's a lot of focus on individual effort and rewards.
AnthonyMouse 5y ago
The thing to understand about the US healthcare system is that it's all based around corruption and waste (where waste to you is profit to someone else). The inefficiency is the point. It's a racket. There are many known better systems and obvious improvements, where "improvement" means you get the same quality of care for less money. But then you get the same quality of care and the providers make less money. Even if you're going to have a market-based system, things like price transparency would make it more efficient. Which is why they fight it so hard. If all we did was replace the existing insurance system with single payer, it would solve nothing, because all the same lobbyists would just make sure that the government continues to overpay them. Single payer advocates like to point out that Medicare pays a bit less than private insurance in the US, but Medicare pays a lot more than single payer systems do in other countries. And if it was the only payer in the US then the lobbying pressure to increase what it pays them would be even higher. Regardless of who is doing the paying, the problem that actually needs to be solved is the corruption.
jedberg 5y ago
American healthcare is fantastic for the wealthy. Get what you want when you want with almost no wait. We also get treatments you can't get in Canada, if you have enough money. The wealthy in the US have some of the best health outcomes in the world. It's only when you average with the middle class and the poor that our average outcomes drop. The system stays the way it does because it's great for the people with power -- the wealthy.
- refurb 5y ago
  American healthcare is actually pretty good for the middle class too. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-friends-with-breast-cancer-1-has-coverage-for-costly-drug-the-other-forced-to-pay-1.4495123 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-... ” She later learned that, not only is Ibrance not covered in B.C., but the test that detected the return of her cancer isn't done anywhere in Canada. "I always thought, it's crazy that my backup to save my life is another country," said McDonald. "Then I found out that this other country — which I thought had a healthcare system that was so superior to the U.S. — doesn't test for the tumour marker that saved my life, and doesn't cover this drug that is responsible for pushing my cancer into remission after traditional chemotherapy failed to do that."”

by 14 5y ago

eagsalazar2 5y ago

14 5y ago
I called my doctors office, had an appointment 2 weeks later. He ordered tests, about 1 month later got them. The blood work was as soon as I went to the lab and stood in line for half an hour so a few days later. About 5 days after I took the blood tests my doctor called me personally to tell me all negative. In the end I had a pinched nerve from a bit of scoliosis and chiro really helped. Chiro is not covered by our health care completely, I paid $80 then $40 for follow up visits. Chiro took my pain away with an exercise routine. All is well and the system worked fast and I was happy with how it all went.
nradov 5y ago
I'm not sure what you heard on Fox News but the average time for a Canadian to go from initial consultation to actual treatment by a specialist was 3 months in 2020. https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wait-times-for-health-care-in-canada-2020 https://www.fraserinstitute.org/studies/waiting-your-turn-wa... It's common for Canadians who can afford it to travel to the US (and other countries) for more rapid treatment. https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-03/canadians-increasingly-come-to-us-for-health-care https://www.usnews.com/news/best-countries/articles/2016-08-... Since demand for healthcare is effectively unlimited, all healthcare systems have to ration care. The US system primarily rations based on ability to pay. The Canadian system rations by restricting supply and forcing less urgent cases to wait.

rubyist5eva 5y ago

> There is no such thing as a bill. There are plenty of private healthcare services in Canada. Ever been to the dentist?

refurb 5y ago

As a Canadian my mom waited 16 months for a hip transplant. She could barely get around her house, but she was deemed “lower priority”. While my coworker in the Bay Area got her a choice of surgery slots less than a month out. There are trade offs.

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
lifeformed 5y ago
In the US, the waits are short because few can afford to be in them.
- nradov 5y ago
  In the US there are about 400K hip replacements performed every year. That's a lot more than a "few". The vast majority of Americans have some form of insurance which covers joint replacement surgery if they meet the medical necessity criteria.
thawkins 5y ago
In both Canada and the UK there is also private systems available that you can decide to avail yourself off, which like the US system will charge you into bankruptcy but will give you the immediacy you desire, then you get to have a choice, wait or debt.
- mardifoufs 5y ago
  At least here in quebec, the private system is not allowed to provide a lot of services and cannot provide much more than basic consultation, cosmetic surgery or treatments that are more or less arbitrarily allowed by the public insurance system. Tons of people went to the state when the public system basically stopped treating anything they didn't deem to be essential for almost a year back in 2020. I know tons of US hospitals did the same, but some didn't so you at least had a choice. Here, once the government decided that your disease, surgery or therapy wasn't "essential" you couldn't do anything at all because the private system can't do most them either. Both of my parents are nurses & according to them at one point their hospitals were almost entirely empty, but because of that arbitrary you still couldn't access most non-urgent care which was very frustrating for them.

rtkwe 5y ago

There's a lot of reasons behind it I think as a complete history/politics deletant; damage from cold war anticommunism, side effect of post world war 2 success, and the general story the US and it's citizens tell about themselves as individualistic. The US came out of WW2 immensely wealthy (overall of course not everyone was allowed to participate in the boom) which buried a lot of the impetus that pushed other European countries to create their national health systems. Then we were fighting against communism which took so many forms of social programs into the area of forbidden ideology that could spell the doom of the US and the rest of the world. And then there's just the individualistic streak that seems to have been endemic to the US since it's founding. Religiously as well as economically there's a lot of focus on individual effort and rewards.

AnthonyMouse 5y ago

The thing to understand about the US healthcare system is that it's all based around corruption and waste (where waste to you is profit to someone else). The inefficiency is the point. It's a racket. There are many known better systems and obvious improvements, where "improvement" means you get the same quality of care for less money. But then you get the same quality of care and the providers make less money. Even if you're going to have a market-based system, things like price transparency would make it more efficient. Which is why they fight it so hard. If all we did was replace the existing insurance system with single payer, it would solve nothing, because all the same lobbyists would just make sure that the government continues to overpay them. Single payer advocates like to point out that Medicare pays a bit less than private insurance in the US, but Medicare pays a lot more than single payer systems do in other countries. And if it was the only payer in the US then the lobbying pressure to increase what it pays them would be even higher. Regardless of who is doing the paying, the problem that actually needs to be solved is the corruption.

jedberg 5y ago

American healthcare is fantastic for the wealthy. Get what you want when you want with almost no wait. We also get treatments you can't get in Canada, if you have enough money. The wealthy in the US have some of the best health outcomes in the world. It's only when you average with the middle class and the poor that our average outcomes drop. The system stays the way it does because it's great for the people with power -- the wealthy.

refurb 5y ago
American healthcare is actually pretty good for the middle class too. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-friends-with-breast-cancer-1-has-coverage-for-costly-drug-the-other-forced-to-pay-1.4495123 https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/a-tale-of-2-... ” She later learned that, not only is Ibrance not covered in B.C., but the test that detected the return of her cancer isn't done anywhere in Canada. "I always thought, it's crazy that my backup to save my life is another country," said McDonald. "Then I found out that this other country — which I thought had a healthcare system that was so superior to the U.S. — doesn't test for the tumour marker that saved my life, and doesn't cover this drug that is responsible for pushing my cancer into remission after traditional chemotherapy failed to do that."”